Handling your finances can be a challenge, but putting your books online can speed up the process of keeping them up-to-date.

In addition to the many useful features a web-based accounting application will offer, you can let a virtual assistant or a CPA help you manage your finances just by giving them access to your account. These tools — which are an updated list from an earlier article — can make managing your bookkeeping that much easier, as well as keep the costs of handling your bookkeeping down.

Outright: A free bookkeeping service created by team members who originally worked for Quickbooks, Outright is simplified so that a business owner can keep up with the books along with everything else on his plate.

Harvest: Need to track time for an individual or a team? Harvest lets you track the minutes spent on a given project and transform that information into invoices that you can easily send out. You can also track expenses and other information related to your bookkeeping easily.

Bill.com: Get all your bill payments in one place with Bill.com. It synchronizes with your bank accounts and other accounting tools to let you send out payments to your vendors, eliminating the paper-shuffling that normally goes with paying bills every month.

Kashflow: If you’re based in the UK, Kashflow will be particularly useful. It’s built with UK businesses in mind and simplifies the work necessary to manage your business’ finances.

Blinksale: You can send invoices quickly and easily through Blinksale. If your clients will pay through PayPal, all you have to do is include a PayPal link and they can send money your way immediately. It also synchronizes with tools such as Basecamp, making managing a business online even easier.

LessAccounting: Unless your job title is “accountant,” the less accounting work you have to do, the better. That’s the premise behind LessAccounting, which uses a streamlined approach to keeping your books.

Xero: With more than 100,000 users, Xero is simple option with features that many web-based accounting tools are lacking (like the ability to manage payroll). Xero offers localized taxation information for a variety of countries and continues to add more.

QuickBooks Online: While QuickBooks remains one of the most popular options for accounting software out there, the online option offers the added bonus of always having the most up to date version of a very robust bookkeeping tool.

Freshbooks: Invoicing is Freshbooks’ greatest strength, but it also offers a full suite of bookkeeping tools. You can even manage contractors through the software, letting you keep all the details of a business in one place.

Xpenser: Regularly on the go? Xpenser lets you track your expenses on your phone, even if you don’t have a smartphone. That allows you to keep up with your bookkeeping without running the risk of losing a receipt or otherwise getting behind.

LiteAccounting: For bare bones accounting, LiteAccounting is a good choice. The application tracks invoices and handles expenses, keeping the time you spend on bookkeeping to a minimum. While it may not be the first choice for a larger business, it can work well if you’re just one person managing every aspect of your company.

Zoho Invoice: You can manage more than just invoices with Zoho Invoice — the tool integrates everything from quotes to online payments. You can also find tools for just about every other aspect of your business, from document management to CRM, through Zoho.

WorkingPoint: Meant as an all-in-one solution, WorkingPoint brings together not only online bookkeeping but also inventory tracking, contact management, and even financial reporting. You may have encountered WorkingPoint under its original name, NetBooks.

Sidomac: If you work with a bookkeeper outside your office to keep your records up-to-date, Sidomac makes keeping information up to date easy for both you and your bookkeeper, eliminating any need to synchronize files.

Bionic Books: A full-fledged accounting tool, Bionic Books can generate all the reports you could need — all without you needing to take a course in accounting to understand them.

Merchant’s Mirror: With Merchant’s Mirror, not only are you able to collect and track a wide variety of information about your business, but you can also use the tool’s features to help you predict outcomes and make decisions.

Nice Post Bram. However, I am still wondering to know what was the criteria you applied while preparing this list of top applications. You should also consider Invoicera for this list as this application does offer all the advanced invoicing and time tracking features and supports over 18 payment gateways (no other invoicing app support these numbers of gateways).